If you relied on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday to catch up on the National Book Awards, the winners of which were announced Wednesday night, you might be forgiven for not realizing that the National Book Foundation awarded a prize for poetry.

In her report Lynn Neary devotes one sentence to Robert Hass‘s Time and Materials winning that prize. She gives several more over to finalist David Kirby, who seems a bit wide-eyed at being in New York and away from his home in Tallahassee, Fla., a place, he says, “which only has about four people in it.”

It is instead the prose writers who draw the bulk of Neary’s attention, from Christopher Hitchens‘s testy performance earlier in the week to Tim Weiner‘s theorizing of what intelligence work should be. Why? Because of their political engagement. Neary’s piece, after all, appears online under the title “Politics Center Stage at National Book Awards.”

This is unfortunate. Perhaps Hass helped to marginalize himself by observing, in a pre-awards-ceremony interview, that

I’ve always had the feeling that political poetry is pretty much doomed. Emily Dickinson wrote the greatest poems written during the Civil War, and they’re mostly about having her feelings hurt by her sister-in-law.

I quote unfairly here: Hass precedes these remarks with some thoughts on violence and “this senseless war.” But the core of Neary’s dismissive coverage is embedded in these two sentences.

Yet her treatment of Hass’s win and Hass’s own remarks stand at variance with the poems in Time and Materials. Nathan Heller recently made clear at Slate that Hass’s collection is deeply political – that it “makes poetry and politics bedfellows.” But his reading of Hass’s “Bush’s War” makes clear why Hass’s political edge might seem a bit blunted:

As “Bush’s War” reels from Nazi death camps to Sept. 11 to Iraq, Hass laments “a taste for power/ That amounts to contempt for the body.” In the end, he isn’t fighting hawkish politics or the immorality of violence. He’s fighting a mentality that holds his project—honoring subjectivity, physicality, directness—in disdain.

Mentality, subjectivity, physicality. That’s dull stuff in comparison to a poet who can provide population figures for the capital of Florida.